In a computer network such as a data center, data is transmitted from a source to a destination in the form of packets that generally pass through one or more network devices (e.g., switches, routers, firewalls, etc.). During the transmission, packets are generally temporarily stored in one or more network buffers of the network devices.
Certain data center customers demand network architectures that can provide low latency, high bandwidth, and often massive scalability. An Ethernet switching fabric, comprised of numerous fixed switches in a flattened topology, is a network architecture that is generally used to satisfy these demands. In an Ethernet switching fabric, the fixed switches will often have a switch-on-a-chip (SOC) architecture that provides smaller network buffers than networking devices having modular or crossbar-based designs. However, even if the network buffers were large enough to accommodate all incoming traffic, excess buffering can cause any traffic to incur additional latency.